New Decameron Seventy-Five: Karl Schroeder

Forbidden Life

By Karl Schroeder

Vienna was made for burglers.

Roma Lev eased herself down the slope of the roof, careful not to press too hard on the old verdigrised copper sheeting. It was startlingly at body temperature under her hands; the Western sky was still striped in pale peach and mauve from the August sunset.

There were plenty of people out on other roofs, and no wonder. The top floors of the interconnected residences that formed Vienna's old town had once been too hot for habitation in the summer. They stuck the maids up here. Now that air conditioning existed, it was the rich who wanted these dormer rooms with their fantastical oval windows gazing out over the mystery of the city. But she could stroll between the smokestacks as if the roofscape were a public plaza, only occasionally crouching to avoid the slightline of some lounging local.

She'd never done anything like this, in this life--but in others? Lots of examples came to mind, and she trusted her muscle memory. There was no tremor to her hand or hesitation as she trotted along the lead-lined gutter, a sixty-foot fall on her left.

She glanced down and smiled as she recognized the street. This was just up from the Mozarthaus. She'd never been in, but remembered walking past it a few times when she'd lived here in the 1890s. Mahler had been conducting here, Klimt was painting and Freud formulating his theories; she'd been unaware of any of them. This, she'd learned, was the pathos of immortality: to be on-hand for every historical moment but recognize few of them nor their players at the time. Who knew what world-changing people lived here now, whom she would also miss?

The rounded dormer window was just ahead. It shone a moon of amber into the night. That would make breaking in easier, as she would only present a silhouette from the outside. She adjusted her satchel and reached in for the pry-bar. Her fingers brushed the pistol and twitched away.

Slowing to a crawl, she peered around the edge of the window. Her target was standing in the center of the attic space, facing away, and staring at her phone. She posed in an unconscious store-dummy stance, feet planted wide, head tilted, all her attention on the little screen in her hand.

Roma eased across the window, found that it was already unlocked and ajar, and swung it open. She hopped lightly inside and drew out the pistol. This was going to be easy.

She had a perfect bead on the back of Tamara Dunne's head. There was no way she would miss and, after all, she'd had centuries of practice at this.

Dunne gave a little chuckle, flicked a finger across the screen of the phone.

Roma rolled her shoulders, took a deep breath, and aimed again.

Dunne nodded very faintly, flicked.

Roma adjusted her stance to something more professional and braced her right hand with her left.

Dunne scratched her nose, flicked the screen.

Roma's hands began to shake.

Dunne looked back. "Christ!" The phone flipped away and when it landed Roma stepped on it. She thrust the pistol in Dunne's face.

There must be something to say at a moment like this, but all she managed was, "Well."

"Wh-who are you? What do you want?" Dunne's hands were in the air as she backed against the attic's armoir. "Please, I have nothing."

"It's not what you have." The dam had broken and now Roma was able to say, "It's what you're doing. This is nothing personal."

"Wait, what? You're here to--" Dunne looked at the window, then back to Roma. The expression on her face shifted slightly. "You had a perfect shot. Why didn't you--?"

Roma hit her on the side of the head. 

#

"Close your eyes," Anton had said, "and remember all the things you've done. You can do this."

They'd been sitting on another rooftop, a few kilometers from here. The sun was high, baking the old town. Roma thought about similar moments she'd lived, and it was easy to find them. There had been her recovery of a Forbidden Life's bequest in Marseille in 1755; that had involved some rooftop skulking. She had seduced a Bavarian warlord centuries before that. In Anna Kommena's court, she schemed with the best of the Byzantines. And in the lives between, she'd played confidence games, betrayed lovers, been a nimble pickpocket, disguised herself as a boy more times than she could count. Things were easier for women now than they'd ever been. And the toolkit was better, too.

She opened her eyes. "Yes," she'd said.

Now the pistol sat on the bedside table, which she'd pulled out and placed in front of her as she perched on a barstool from the attic's tiny kitchenette. Doctor Dunne was bound hand and foot, with a bunched stocking stuffed in her mouth. She glared at Roma, apparently not afraid at all.

"I'm going to ask you some questions," said Roma. "And if you make any noise at all, I will shoot you."

Dunne didn't blink. Roma sighed heavily and pulled on her end of the stocking.

The researcher spat, said, "Bleah." Then: "How old are you? Twenty?"

"Where did you get the formula?"

Dunne blinked. "What? Formula? I work with molecules, not formulas."

"One molecule. The molecule. The one that makes analethe."

A headshake. "I don't know that name. Wait, is it proprietary? Is that what this is about? Somebody's patented it? Then why send a..." She made a face. "Underaged assassin? You need lawyers."

"I'm older than you think." Roma picked up the gun. "But short on patience. Your lab investigates new pharmaceuticals. Some of them are psychoactive. You tweak those by clipping up LSD and magic mushrooms and other. But there is one," and her voice rose as she slid the table aside, "that you can't have. An impossible one. I think you know what I mean."

Finally, Dunne's eyes went wide. She licked her lips, glancing about. "Jesus. It's like he said."

Roma sat down again. "He? Who--?"

"This Dutch guy! Called himself Guerin. He came to us with a boatload of studies on a particular substance. But they were unpublished. We'd done trials on something similar and he wanted to reverse-engineer the formula. I wasn't sure we should proceed, the studies not being published and the researchers' names elided. But this wasn't a recreational drug. He wasn't from the cartels..."

At the name Guerin, Roma's hands had started to shake again. She looked away, cleared her throat. "What did it do? This drug?"

"What did you call it? Analethe? It affects memory and enhances learning and imagination. When I first read the studies I thought it might be effective for ADHD, but it was the triggering stimulus that blew my--that was unusual."

"Reading."

"Yes! Reading. According to the studies, anyway. They were incomplete but there was enough there to do some work. And we did make something... but it doesn't work." She looked back and forth at her bound wrists. "You have to believe me."

Roma crossed her arms but kept the pistol ready. "What did the studies say that reading did?"

"Supposedly it enhances muscle memory during exercise, so it's more than just a central nervous system effect. But it also carves the sort of deep indelible memories that you normally only get from peak experiences. But only in the presence of certain stimuli. Especially, reading."

"So it's true," said Roma.

"What's true."

"Guerin's trying to get his own supply."

Dunne watched silently as Roma paced.

"Change of plans. We're going to your lab."

"Now?" 

"Of course now! What, you want me to wait for it to open? Walk in and ring the bell on the desk? You must have a key-card. You're going to get us in." When a sly expression came over Dunne's face, Roma added, "And I know there'll be security. You'll tell me the details, or I'll..." she realized the futility of her threat. "Okay, I won't kill you.

"But I will kneecap you. So let's get going."

#

The outskirts of Vienna were forested with refinery stacks, silver towers crepuscular under the moonlight. Once they'd been all lit up and venting day and night, but that was before the carbon bubble collapsed. 

Roma's feet crunched on gravel as she walked back to her car. Dunne was a black silhouette hunched in the back. Roma snatched her little drone out of the air and got in, dropping it on the passenger seat. "Missed me?" she asked.

"You didn't seriously--"

"Got in, did my stuff, and got out again. No sirens. No security guards. This little guy," she patted the drone, "looks for security cameras and fires a laser into them. Anything that might have seen me got fried before I got within fifty meters of the front door."

She'd borrowed Dunne's key card and laptop and had broken into the company's systems with little difficulty. Now she eased the car out of the empty lot next to the squat anonymous office tower, and onto a long bleak avenue with a grassy central boulevard and undeveloped lots on either side. Black hills lurked beyond the harsh circles of street light; there were no other cars on the road. 

"You're bluffing," said Dunne. "You couldn't have--"

The office building's fourth-floor windows blew out in a silent flash. Seconds later the sound reached them, a giant hand smacking the car.

"C4," said Roma. "For your physical samples. Before I left I set a worm loose in your server. It'll have taken out all your files and the backups, unless you have some offline. Nobody does, these days."

Dunne had twisted around to stare at the gouting flames. "Holy shit," she whispered. "But then, you're not--you can't be..."

"Can't be what?" Roma asked sharply. "What did Guerin tell you about us?"

Dunne pressed her lips together and stared out the window as Roma took a left, heading back into the old town. Then she burst out, "He talked about this crazy cult--of people who think they're immortal!"

Roma opened her mouth, closed it again. The temptation to tell someone--anyone--about the wild ride her life had become was almost overwhelming. 

"We're all immortal," she said. "Most of us just don't know it."

There was a long pause while Dunne just stared at her. Then she said, "Where did you get the skills to do that?" She nodded back at the dwindling fire.

Again, Roma wanted to say more, but she kept it to, "Picked them up over many years."

"He said there's a secret society, maybe only a few hundred people, but they use this Analethe. To hallucinate that the books they read are actually memories."

"That's not--" Roma stopped herself. Anton had impressed it on her time and again. "The first rule of the bequests is?" he'd say, and she'd reply:

"Do not talk about the bequests."

#

The gulf between what happened and its impact on her was impossible to express. Days after taking her first dose of analethe, Roma dumped the man she'd thought might become her fiance. In the taut silence after he demanded an explanation, as he tried to stare her down, she'd wondered if she would buckle, and tell him what had happened. She hadn't; so, she smiled at Dunne in the rear-view mirror, and guided the car across the empty brick-lined canal and into the old town.

They'd come to her in the university library--six of them, of different ages and types. First, an old African man blocked the light from the tall stained-glass window at the end of the stack where she was browsing. A young American woman appeared behind him, then another woman with a dark oval face who was dressed in a sari. 

"Roma Lev?" They parted ways for a mild-looking older man with a bald head and a white fringe of hair. He introduced himself as Anton Kaplan. After they found a quiet corner behind the stacks, he explained that they'd sought her out because of an article she'd published on the Venitian doges. "We'd like to perform a little test, if you're willing," he said, and then he laid six objects on the oak reading table.

They were all old: a quill pen; what looked like a silver napkin ring; a small brass dagger with a worn pommel; an intricately carved netsuke; a crude magnifying glass or monocle; a scrap of very old paper with a signature scrawled on it; and a leather shaving strop.

She named each one, then picked up the ring. Kaplan's eyebrows rose a bit. "It looks like a napkin ring but it's really for keeping a scroll wound." She examined it up close. "Byzantine. Ninth century?"

Kaplan swept the rest of the objects back into the black velvet swatch from which he'd taken them. He produced another velvet packet, red this time, and laid out another set of trinkets. Again, Roma picked one up without thinking. "This is from Hamburg, isn't it? Seventeenth century?"

So it went, for three more rounds. Then Kaplan sighed and sat back. He smiled around at his companions. "Ms. Lev, do you know how the Dalai Lama was found?" She shook her head, and he told her how, after the Lama died, a group of monks went out into the countryside to find his new incarnation. They had met a young boy in a remote village, and had tested him by laying out some objects on a table. Most were just random junk, but one had been a prized personal possession of the late leader. The boy had ignored the other things and picked it up without hesitation.

"You just did the same thing, four times in a row," said Kaplan.

"Wait, what?"

"Constantina of Ephesus," mused Kaplan, as he fingered the jeweled bracelet Roma had just chosen. "That was her first name, a thousand years ago. Like all of us, she's had many others over the centuries."

He looked up sharply. "You think I'm crazy, and that my friends and I are part of some kind of cult. But what if I said that we're not here to place any kind of obligation on you. We're not asking you to believe anything. We're just looking for the right person to receive Constantina's bequest."

"Bequest? What's in it?"

"Among other things," said Kaplan blandly, "approximately two hundred million dollars."

#

I am Constantina. The little mantra filled her with giddy strength, as always. Roma pulled the car into a narrow alley near Dunne's building and parked it. 

"What are you going to do?" She could hear the fear in Dunne's voice. Roma thought about it while she walked around to open Dunne's door for her. Clumsy from the curtain pulls that bound her wrists, the biochemist reluctantly got out.

"Of course you'll kill her," Anton Kaplan had said yesterday, as they stood looking out over the city. "It's what you do; after all these centuries, you've become very good at it."

"And then you'll release the rest of my memories?"

He'd nodded. "As promised, we'll go straight to Vatican City. The other books in your bequest are in the Apostolic Archive. We've kept ourselves as safe as possible for the past millennium." He smiled. "It's an inconvenience, but I find it reassuring to know my records are there."

"You'll be fine," she said now to Dunne. Roma's stomach was twisting in a fierce knot. "I'm just taking you home."

"And where is that, exactly?"

She whirled, but it was too late; the stranger in the shadows had a pistol aimed at her. "Oh, wait, I know," said the man. "Right around the corner. Hello, Tamara, it's good to see you again."

"Guerin," croaked Dunne. "Thank God."

The stranger carefully took Roma's gun from her. "Good thing it's so late, we'd make quite the sight, wouldn't we?" His accent was Dutch, as Dunne had hinted; he had curly red hair and broad, almost slavic features. Of course, that was just this version of him; Constantina might have known him with different faces.

"Ah?" Dunne held up her bound hands. "Aren't you going to untie me?"

"Just walk," he said, gesturing toward the street.

"But--"

"You were safer with me," said Roma. 

"But why--"

"This isn't a man," she hissed. "It's a forbidden life. Not one of us. An abomination."

Guerin laughed richly, but the pistol didn't waver. Roma and Tamara Dunne led him to Dunne's building and upstairs to the attic apartment. As they stepped inside, the cool night breeze teased the curtains in the dormer window in the narrow living room. They threaded their way through the kitchen and past the dining room table, and Guerin indicated that both of them should sit. Dunne plunked into the living room's only armchair, and Roma sat on a footstool opposite that. Guerin stood at the window, feet wide apart, with the street-lit curtains curling around him like imitation clouds.

"What's she been telling you?" he asked Dunne. He still sounded amused.

"Nothing. She--she destroyed our work."

He cursed. "All of it? What about backups?" Dunne shook her head.

Roma bit her lip as he raised the pistol, but it was only a gesture of frustration. "You're playing right into their hands, Constantina!"

She gasped. "How do you know that name?"

"Did she tell you who she is?" he asked Dunne. "Or rather--who she thinks she is?" Dunne shook her head.

"This young lady thinks that she is Constantina of Ephesus, a thousand-year-old immortal with superpowers. I told you about the cult, remember?"

He came to stand over Roma. "Analethe was discovered back in Roman times. If you take it, you'll have a nice trip. But if you take while reading--well, it has a particular affinity for the part of the brain that connects narrative to memory. If you read a story and identify with the protagonist--if you imagine yourself there, doing those things--when the analethe wears off, you won't remember having read the story. You'll have lived it.

"Crazy, and dangerous, no? I mean, if you took this, and then read Alice in Wonderland, would you come out the other side sane?" He shook his head.

"But what if you read an autobiography? One by someone very much like yourself, someone who, in another life, you imagine you could have been?

"There are bequests," he said. "They're the records of entire lives, and they're handed down generation after generation to young people who've displayed personalities remarkably like the author's. The people who safeguard the bequests seek out such people, and convince them to handle the artifacts, and read the biographies--while taking analethe."

The look of pity Dunne sent Roma drove her to fury. She almost jumped Guerin, half-convinced she could take him down before he shot her. "You're cheapening something sacred! This isn't some stoner party. The bequests are an unbroken chain of real memory, just temporarily offloaded to print, then loaded again when a fit vessel comes along." She glared at Dunne. "I am truly Constanina of Ephesus, who just kicked your ass and blew up your little laboratory. I could have done all that in my sleep, because I've done far more, and far worse!"

"Far worse," murmured Guerin. "That's the crux of the problem, isn't it?"

"Shut up!"

"Y-you called him a forbidden life," said Dunne. She looked up at Guerin nervously. "What did you mean?"

Roma looked up too, and shuddered when Guerin met her eyes. She lowered her gaze.

"Let's just say, he read Alice."

#

"Nicely put," said Guerin, "But this isn't about me. It's about you, and what you were sent here to do."

"You know nothing about--" He pointed the pistol at her and she went quiet.

"I have my sources," he said. "Does it shock you that I might still have friends inside the Society?" He lowered the gun. "Or that you used to be one of them?"

"I could never be!"

"How do you know that? Have you read all your biographies?" She hunched down. "You haven't, because Kaplan and his cronies won't release them to you. They want you to 'prove yourself' first, don't they?"

He was standing next to the coffee table now, his back to Dunne, who was squirming in her chair. Crossing his arms, Guerin scowled down at Roma. "They demanded that you kill this woman. A kind of rite of passage. Then they'd release the rest of your memories to you, no?" She shrugged. 

"But you didn't do it. Let me ask you this, Constantina. How did it feel, when you had her in your sights? Was it you? Did it feel right, the way that choosing a cup or an old pistol off a roll of velvet felt right? Or did it feel..."

Wrong. Aiming her gun at Dunne had felt very wrong. She looked at the curtains, the ceiling, the light; anywhere but him.

"Kaplan told you he's known you for centuries. So how could he have not known that Constanina of Ephesus has never, in any of her lives, ever murdered someone?"

"Sh-shut up! Why were you trying to get your own supply of analethe, if you don't believe in any of this? If you don't believe in your own story, what the hell are you wanting to read?"

"Anything I God-damn want!" He reared over her, fists clenched. "And the rest of the world has the right to as well! Because all memory is storytelling! And we all have the right to the live the tales we choose, not those that're thrust on us--"

He flew sideways and broke the legs of the coffee table as he landed on it. Dunne threw aside the lamp she'd hit him with and dove to retrieve his pistol.

Keeping it aimed at Roma, she retrieved the frayed curtain pulls she'd untied herself from, and threw them at Roma. "Not so good as you thought. Your turn."

Roma turned them over, frowning, as Dunne picked up her cracked but functional phone. "What are you doing?"

"Calling the police. They'll deal with you. Hello?" Dunne crisply described who and where she was, and said she'd gotten the drop on a couple of burglers. When she finished and laid the phone down again, she said, "They'll be here in a couple of minutes. Just enough time for you to tell me who you are. I mean, who you really are."

Roma steepled her hands, the ties twined through her fingers. Her neat plan was in ruins, and her failure to kill Dunne might prove to Kaplan that she wasn't a fit vessel for Constantina. She felt the draw of the unread chapters of that life, a need strong enough to make her choices for her. She would do anything to regain the rest of herself.

Or would she? She glanced down at Guerin, who was groaning and moving a little. "I was just a Classics and history student. I knew a little Latin. I guess what made me stick out was that I was a bit of a, oh, I dunno, I was mischievous on campus? I was good at things like provoking the engineers into pulling some dumb stunt and then using it for my own advantage. Got myself prime living quarters, named floor warden, that kind of thing. Kaplan says he recognized something in the combination.

"The last Constantina died twenty years ago. They'd been looking ever since. It can take centuries sometimes to find the next incarnation. He offered me money and a way in to, you know, the halls of power sort of thing. And he had these books."

She told Dunne about their first meeting at the library, and about the precious volumes of Constantina's bequest that she was allowed to read. It didn't seem to matter now, if she was to go to jail with Guerin.

"You know what'll happen now?" She threw away the curtain ties, put her head in her hands. "I'll be denounced as an 'aborted return.' Obviously not the right vessel. We're worse than outcasts. We can't be allowed to live. They're going to kill me."

"You can't be serious."

Roma grimaced. "The rules are strict." She stared at nothing, seeing the books in her mind, feeling the hurricane of memory that had swept her away the first time she read her life on analethe. Those distant years were so much more vivid to her now than Roma Lev's childhood. To lose them to some stranger...

"And the forbidden lives?"

"A row of volumes in the Vatican library that nobody's allowed to touch. Immortals who veered abused the analethe, who read outside their own lives." She shuddered. "Who read each others' lives. And Guerin, the Ambiguist, was the worst. His books were stolen centuries ago. We thought he was gone forever."

A dry, if weak laugh came from floor level. "Damn near." Guerin rolled over and put hand to his head. "It was a close thing."

Dunne glanced back at her apartment door, biting her lip. "So what's your story?"

"In this life? Son of an antiquities dealer. Stumbled on a steamer trunk full of old mouldering books and was about to throw them in the incinerator. Those're usually ledgers or census data, or multivolume treatises on the Nature of the Trinity. Just for the hell of it, I opened one of them up and read a couple of pages. Hoo! It was a hell of a story--and when I got to one of the parts about the Society, and analethe, well, obsession time!" He raised his hands, waggled his fingers dramatically. "I wondered if the Society was still around after all these years, and if so could I find it? The books were full of details, but they read like somebody else's story. Exciting, but not me. But they said they could be... So I went hunting."

Guerin sat up slowly, still rubbing his head. He told them how he found the Society's chapter house in Zurich, and stole its stockpile of analethe. He read the bequest of Guerin de Montaigu, and became him.

"But you're Unfinished too, aren't you?" Roma accused. "You ran out of analethe before you could read it all. That's why you came to Dunne here."

He pointed a corrective finger at her. "Not true. Well--not entirely true. I properly read the bequest, but I haven't read all the other books that I read on analethe over the centuries. I haven't completed who Guerin really is."

"And who's that?" Dunne was looking towards the window now. Flashing blue light lit up the building across the street.

"D'Artagnan! Orlando Furioso! Sherlock Holmes!" Guerin grinned. "All the rogues, the heroes, the fearless ones. I've been them all. I'm going to be them again." He shot Roma a sly look. "You know, I've been trying to convince this one to try it for, oh, centuries now."

Roma shook her head. "I am Constantina. I want to live the thread of her life. Only hers."

"But it's a lie, don't you see? The Society has faked up a system to mimic what you'd get if people had immortal souls that could be reincarnated in new bodies. By reading only inside your bequest, you continue this fantasy that the essence of Constantina has flowed into your body, some immaterial substance--but it's not true."

Roma stood up, heedless of Dunne's gun, and backed away.

"The truth is something better!" Carefully, Guerin stood as well. "The truth is there is no divine spark moving between lives. We could print a million copies of Constantina's life, and if analethe were legal everybody could read her. Become her! And why not? The past doesn't exist, only this moment, and in this moment you decide who you are! Not some dusty volume on a shelf.

"At least get it through your head that Kaplan's playing you! Think! Why would he withhold a true life's books? He tried to make you into a murderer, so that when you read the rest of the bequest, you'd come out compromised, distorted. Diminished! He doesn't want to revive you, he wants to remake you as an instrument of his own ambitions. Ask yourself, Constantina, who's the abomination here?"

Roma put her face in her hands, and began to sob.

Guerin had stepped to the window, and now blue light painted his face in rhythmic pulses. He rounded on Dunne. "You tried to call the police."

"Of course I did, I--"

"On that phone?" He pointed. Dunne looked doubtful suddenly.

"Yes, it's my phone--"

"Which the Society cracked weeks ago! That's why I've been staying away. I knew they were on to us. They've been intercepting your calls. You may think you called the police just now, but whoever's coming up the stairs, it's not them!"

"Uh, no, that can't be."

Guerin brought out his own phone and unlocked it. "You don't believe me?" He threw it to Dunne. "Call them again on this one. But be quick about it."

As Dunne tried with increasing desperation to explain herself to someone on the phone, Roma heard footsteps on the narrow stairs. She stepped next to Guerin, incidents and events from a vast echoing past flashing through her mind. "The rooftops," she said; he nodded. "But we have to slow them down--"

"Do the helpless act," he said. "Lights down, just you positioned--"

"--Behind the table, got it--"

"And I'll be--"

"Behind the door." They moved as one past Dunne, who had gone gray. Guerin plucked his phone from her fingers as Roma turned down all the lights except one lamp that she aimed at herself. She picked up some useful items and got into position.

The door slammed open, nearly hitting Guerin. Four men in combat gear crowded the doorway. One raised his assault rifle, hesitated as Roma said, "Oh, thank you!" while raising her hands--

--And he took a coffee table leg in the face. As he spun around Guerin clipped him in the jaw, kicked the feet from under the man behind him, and stepped aside as Roma shoved the table into the third’s midriff.

In seconds they were all laid out, but there was more shouting from downstairs. Roma grabbed Dunne's hand. "Come on!"

"I'm not part of this."

"You are now. The Society won't let you live. They'll never believe that you can't make analethe, and if they've been listening through your phone, they know you've heard too much about the bequests. Come on!"

They scrambled onto the rooftop. For a second Constantina breathed the glorious summer night air, drew in the vast dome of starlit sky; then she turned to Guerin. "You've doomed me."

He shook his head. "I came back to save you. And I will. Look, I know you're not ready to take the same path as me. Frankly, it scares me too. But we have a chance here, if Dunne can finish her work."

"So, we hide her." The researcher was looking from Roma to Guerin as they raced across the ancient rooftops.

"We hide Dunne, and then," Guerin turned to look Roma in the eye. "You and I go after your books. First, the ones Kaplan's keeping, then the rest from the Vatican."

Roma staggered to a stop. "But why would you do that?"

"You haven't read that part yet."

He grinned. "But I want to see the look on your face when you do."

He beckoned her onward.

**********************************************************

"Oh that was so clever," Maya says.

"So very clever, yes," he agrees. "And you know what, it's a perfect example of something that both uses and expands genre conventions. We're used to reading stories about immortals, we accept that without a blink, and then he takes that expectation and turns it inside out to do something really interesting with it."

"Yes," Maya says. "I wish it was real."

"Analethe? You want to be people you read about?" he looks at her, surprised.

"Yes! Don't you?"

"No, rather the opposite," he says.

"But to know so much, to become, to shape, not to be limited to one life. It would be so great!"

He taps the book, frowning.

"Did you get some?" she asks suddenly.

'No. We didn't actually have a chance. And I'm not sure I would have anyway. Something like that is very dangerous. Think about what we've been reading! Do you want to be those people?"

"I definitely want to be Penric." Maya says. "And Rowan! Oh how I want to be Rowan!"

"Well I didn't steal any so we don't have to worry about how careful we'd have to be with it. But it's a terrific idea. Karl Schroeder keeps having these fascinating ideas. The inside of his head must be a very interesting place to live." He picks up the next book. "Ready for some fun? And maybe some lunch?"

"Lunch does seem like a good idea, though we do have some pear cake left," Maya says, reaching for the book.

"Let's save the pear cake for now. This is Unfinished Tally, by Reese Hogan, another complete new short story, we're doing well on those today."

Maya nods, and takes it, and they read.